Thoughts on the Beethoven Year
Isabel Mundry
The works of Beethoven stand as a paradigm of music in the spirit of Enlightenment and progress. It is with good reason that we have begun to critically examine these values, and the more consequent we are in doing so, the more honest we have to be in reflecting anew on the significance of Beethoven’s music. I increasingly tend to hear this music from the perspective of people from different cultural backgrounds who are critical toward the paradigms of the central European canon. This influences my own listening as well. I am more aware, for instance, of the limits of the notion of self as it is emphatically present in Beethoven’s music. The meaning I used to ascribe to this music as the child of an educated bourgeois German family has long disintegrated. But the music has survived it. I still listen to it, albeit in a different way. That is the good thing about consistent music: in the long term, it seems to be immune to attempts at monopolization. There are works I have heard performed, after a fashion, on the street dozens of times—yet I still love them. In the same way, the omnipresence of Beethoven’s music, even in an anniversary year, has no significant influence on my relationship to it. As a creative artist, Beethoven to me is a composer whose works I can admire, although I will only rarely allow them to speak to me while I am developing a composition. There is, however, one crucial thing I have learned from his music: that over time every detail can become vital and that every moment can be simultaneously perceived as a statement and a question. Some of his contemporaries, including Schubert and Brahms, likely experienced Beethoven’s example as a burden—but this burden eventually seems to have been transformed into stimulation. I think one should take a relaxed
18
